Illinois Hospital Delivery Robot: 7,298 Deliveries and 4,125.5 Staff Hours

Clinical time lost to hallway errands

Much of a hospital's daily motion has little to do with bedside care. Supplies, lab specimens and linens travel between units by hand, and each trip pulls a nurse or technician away from a patient for a few minutes at a time. Those minutes rarely appear on a schedule, yet they add up across a shift.

At a suburban Illinois hospital within a two-hospital health system, leaders faced that pattern every day. The question was how to give clinical staff back some of those minutes without changing how patients were cared for or how departments worked together.

• Supplies and specimens carried between units by hand
• Short interruptions that pull clinicians away from patients
• Clinical hours that are hard to recover once they are lost

Putting the robot on routine internal runs

The hospital put a delivery robot on routine internal runs beginning in August 2022. Staff loaded items and sent the robot along its route, which left the people closest to patients free to stay with them.

Every completed run counted toward the deployment record, and staff time saved was estimated from the time each delivery would otherwise have taken. The working period ran through March 2023, long enough for routines to settle and the totals to build.

• Choose a delivery robot suited to routine internal runs
• Begin service on hospital floors in August 2022
• Log each completed delivery through March 2023
• Estimate clinical staff time saved from time per delivery

What the deployment recorded

Over the deployment period the robot completed 7,298 deliveries. The robot supplier credits those runs with 4,125.5 clinical staff hours saved, which places recovered staff time at the center of the outcome.

The hours figure is an estimate the supplier built from time per delivery, so it reads as the supplier's own accounting rather than an audited count. Read alongside the delivery total, it shows how many small interruptions moved off clinical staff and onto the robot.

For a hospital planning its own deployment, the useful lesson is the method. Ask how each hour is calculated, then test those assumptions against your own route data before putting a figure in a budget.

What this means for a hospital weighing a robot lease

A hospital delivery robot earns its place when runs are frequent, predictable and tied to clinical work. Route maps, floor layouts and elevator access need a close look before any unit is chosen, which is why a site assessment comes first.

Service Robot Co. is an OEM neutral integrator for US businesses. We select the right robot across manufacturers, then lease it through financing on a three year lease with one fixed robot lease payment quoted after a site assessment. We deploy, integrate, train and service each unit through our nationwide US engineer network, so one partner handles the whole lifecycle.